Comment, despatches, musings and gratuitous offensiveness from Paris and elsewhere

Sunday, October 14, 2012

François Hollande and the bedroom farce paralysing France

As a new book scrutinises French president François Hollande’s unique personal life, Anne-Elisabeth Moutet reveals how his
inability to stand up to his love interests is now threatening his
administration

French president Francois Hollande and his former partner Segolene RoyalPhoto: REX FEATURES

By Anne-Elisabeth Moutet

7:00AM BST 14 Oct 2012

It started off like a French farce. Will it end up like a Greek tragedy?
France’s “First Girlfriend”, Valérie Trierweiler, may well cause the
political downfall of the man she fought so bitterly to catch – and still
can’t get a marriage commitment from.

Five months after he was elected, François Hollande’s popularity figures are
the lowest of any French president since Charles de Gaulle signed the 1962
treaty acknowledging the independence of Algeria after a bloody
anti-colonialist war.

The general consensus is that Ms Trierweiler is one of the chief reasons why
the Fifth Republic’s seventh president is seen as henpecked, inefficient and
vacillating – in short, not in charge.

“The five women who make his life hell” was last week’s headline on news
magazine L’Express. First on the list were the president’s partners, past
and present: Ségolène Royal, the former presidential contender and mother of
Hollande’s four children; and Valérie, the Paris-Match journalist who won
Hollande from Royal.

The other three were former Socialist leader Martine Aubry, Green leader
Cécile Duflot, and Angela Merkel: they would never have been qualified by
gender if Hollande’s chaotic private life wasn’t the first subject of gossip
and conjecture these days.

In this toxic environment came the revelations in La Frondeuse (“The
Troublemaker”), a new biography published last Thursday by journalists Alix
Bouilhaguet and Christophe Jakubyszyn, that while she was busy prying
Hollande away from the home he’d been making with Royal for more than two
decades, the (still-married) Trierweiler was three-timing – or should it be
four-timing? – him with Patrick Devedjian, a former Sarkozyste cabinet
minister.

The book also recounts how, around the same time, a spitting-mad Ségolène
accused Hollande of cheating on her with Anne Hidalgo, an elegant brunette
Socialist politician, now Deputy Mayor of Paris, and expected to run for
City Hall herself in 2015.

If, by this stage, you’re getting confused, let’s take a deep breath and
plough on. Hollande and Royal meet while students at ENA, the top government
school that in France guarantees you a network and a career Oxbridge
graduates can only dream of. They became one of France’s Left-wing power
couples, seemingly unmarried because it was so un-bourgeois, so much, well,
cooler. Assigned to cover them for Paris-Match was a young and elegant
political reporter, Trierweiler, herself twice-married. When, in 1992,
Royal, then minister for social affairs, invited the press to the maternity
clinic where she’d just had her daughter Flora, it was Trierweiler who
covered the birth, in breathless prose. The fact that a woman minister would
admit the public to such a personal event was treated as a feminist
breakthrough.

Hollande and Trierweiler didn’t get together then; but in La Frondeuse it is
alleged that they had linked up by 1997, far earlier than the official
version which dates it back to 2005. Meanwhile, Trierweiler was making a
name for herself in the old style of French women political journalists:
getting inside information with, let’s say, allure and poise.

If this sounds distasteful, that is because it is. And for this (happily
receding) journalistic tradition, we have to thank one of France’s great
magazine editors, the late Françoise Giroud – later Valéry Giscard
d’Estaing’s minister for women’s rights – who, when she headed L’Express in
the Sixties and Seventies, sent out a large number of personable female
reporters to “charm” the largely male political class and get good stories.

Giroud, herself a hugely gifted writer, but also the mistress of the
flamboyant politician and L’Express proprietor Jean-Jacques
Servan-Schreiber, would teach her young reporters how to dress and give them
social deportment tips.

All of her alumni were talented in their own right; most of them later became
top executives in television news or newspapers. Still, acceptance and
access was given to them because of their youth and looks rather than their
competence – and most of them had quite public affairs with (married) top
politicians.

Starting out in the 1980s, I still remember how every politician I was sent to
interview seemed to assume that I would be available if they cared enough to
ask: after a couple of weeks, I asked my then employers to transfer me to
the foreign desk. Nothing untoward had happened, but I hated every single
minute it. Getting shot at in southern Lebanon was blissfully uncomplicated
by comparison.

The zeitgeist moves on, even in France: while affairs still go on, the
relationship between politicians and the press has been “normal” for a
while. The Giroud world is as alien to politicians under the age of 40 as to
the reporters covering them.

But Valérie Trierweiler is, in many ways, an old-fashioned girl. “She is
insecure, jittery, unable to make a choice,” wrote the authors of La
Frondeuse. “She wants it all, a career and the job of First Lady – the press
pass and the office at the Élysée Palace.”

When her editors at Paris-Match, unwilling to antagonise the Élysée but aware
of the conflict of interest, finally summoned up the courage to ask her to
cover culture rather than politics, Trierweiler’s very first article last
June was a review of an Eleanor Roosevelt biography.

“Well, well, well, a First Lady who’s also a journalist! Obviously in America
these things do not cause a scandal,” the piece began, one of many examples
of her tin ear. Another was the highly publicised tweet in support of
Ségolène Royal’s opponent in June’s general election.

Trierweiler’s friends and critics both explain her many public mistakes, as
well as her well-known sudden rages – much feared by Hollande – by her
seemingly bottomless insecurity. “She dreams of getting him to marry her,
but he’s not the marrying kind,” one of them told the book’s authors, who
allege that if Trierweiler finally chose Hollande over Devedjian, at the
time a politician with a brighter future, it is because Devedjian would not
leave Corinne, his wife of 30 years.

The French are notoriously more lenient on homewreckers than les Anglais – the
feeling here is that It’s All More Complicated and Not Just The Woman’s
Fault. This, however, plays against Hollande.

Trierweiler is uniquely disliked (less than 29 per cent of the public have a
good opinion of her), but the President is seen as commitment-shy.
Increasingly, there’s a feeling that he applies the same aimlessness to his
management of public affairs.

Political observers recall how under his 15-year stewardship of the Socialist
Party, his unique compromise style led the party’s “currents” – a fancy name
for the infighting factions more divided by personal ambitions than by
ideology – to complete gridlock. Nothing ever got done. When Martine Aubry
took over as leader from Hollande in 2008, she said the place was such a
mess in every possible way that she even had to unblock the loos herself.

“He’s unable to take a decision,” says a friend of Aubry’s. “It doesn’t do
that much harm running an opposition party. But when he negotiates with
Angela Merkel, it’s a real problem.”

Just as Hollande tries to hide the occasional contact he still has with the
mother of his children – prompting outbursts from Trierweiler when she finds
out – he chose recently to gang up with the Italians and the Spanish rather
than ask Merkel directly for the concessions he sought in the latest
Eurozone negotiations, to the German Chancellor’s outrage.

And just as Merkel is now surprised to find herself missing Nicolas Sarkozy’s
more direct style, the French may begin to wonder whether having a
“hyper-president” in the Élysée wasn’t a better idea in difficult times than
a henpecked figure hiding from the women in his life.

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About Me

Anne-Elisabeth Moutet is a Paris-based journalist and political commentator. She is a columnist for the Telegraph and also writes on French affairs for the Weekly Standard and for Newsweek in the US. She often comments on the news on the BBC, BFM-TV, ARTE, al-Jazeera and France 24. This blog contains stories she wrote for these, as well as for The European, The Sunday Times, Tatler, Prospect, the Chicago Sun-Times, and more. Contact her here.
Follow @moutet here on Twitter.